That question is at the crux of a different kind of emergency savings fund. A “f*ck off fund” is savings you can leverage when you need to break away from your current situation – say, when you need to leave a harmful relationship or a problematic job. The term was coined a few years ago and has become popular, in recognition of its distinctiveness from other types of savings and its importance especially among women.

After great anticipation, three years’ worth to be exact, the 2017 Global Findex Database was officially released this morning. The Global Findex is the authoritative data source on global progress toward financial inclusion. Released every three years, the Global Findex surveys more than 150,000 adults in 144 economies to better understand how people access and use financial services to make payments, and also to save and borrow.

Since the 2014 Findex, the percent of the global population that has a bank account with a financial institution or mobile money service rose from 62 percent to 69 percent. Five-hundred and fifteen million individuals opened an account for the first time over the past three years, reducing the unbanked population to 1.7 billion adults worldwide. However, the new data also reveal critical shortcomings in progress. For instance, the financial inclusion gender gap didn’t improve. Globally, women remain 7 percent less likely to own a bank account than men.

> Posted by Sonja Kelly and Elisabeth Rhyne, Director of Research and Managing Director, CFI

The World Bank is just days from releasing the next version of its Global Financial Inclusion Index (Findex), the authoritative data source on global progress toward financial inclusion. The dataset, which tracks financial inclusion in 150 countries, is released once every three years, and we have been waiting eagerly to see how things have changed since 2014. We are confident that the numbers will show enormous progress on the World Bank’s goal of universal access to financial accounts. But we wonder whether the news will also indicate that people are actually using those accounts and whether financial services are helping them achieve financial health, gain resilience and pursue opportunity – the ultimate goals of financial inclusion.

After we high-five the World Bank team for a job well-done, here are a few things that we will be looking for when we examine the new Findex numbers:

We hope reading this post is just one of many activities you undertake today that acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of women. This International Women’s Day, we turned to a few of the women of CFI to share their thoughts on the gender gap facing lower income women around the world and ways to shift the balance in their favor.

Deborah Drake

Deborah Drake says, “International Women’s Day gives us a chance to appreciate the hard work and sacrifice women make every day for their families. It also highlights the challenges involved in giving women the opportunity for economic empowerment and the ability to make choices, including financial decisions for themselves and their families.” (As Vice President of CFI’s Investing in Inclusive Finance Program, Deborah leads the Africa Board Fellowship Program and the Financial Inclusion Equity Council.)

A breakdown on gender diversity in the digital currency industry

Is cryptocurrency a household word now? How about blockchain or Bitcoin? You don’t have to be immersed in financial services to regularly hear about the soaring values of digital currencies, the launch of new products and systems, and other industry developments. Just last week, for example, the Government of Venezuela announced that it was launching a national cryptocurrency backed by its petrol supply. Switzerland is doing the same. And they’re only two of a growing list of countries actively exploring alternative digital currencies.

Women-focused insurance solutions are a central part of AXA’s Emerging Customers work. In our SHEforSHIELD report, launched with the International Finance Corporation in 2015, we found that the market is growing quickly, as women become more risk-aware and willing to invest in protection. We conducted focus groups with women in Indonesia, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and learned that women have very specific, yet unmet needs when it comes to insurance. I am happy to share the stories of three of the women we met on our customer insights journey, diving into their fears and desires and the role that inclusive, women-focused insurance solutions could play.

Alice is a smallholder farmer in Machakos, a semi-arid town east of Nairobi, where subsistence farming is prevalent. Most farmers in Machakos grow maize and other drought-resistant crops for domestic consumption and sell whatever little surplus they have at the gates of their farms and in local markets. Until recently, Alice struggled to make a decent living from her small plot of land and small grocery. She did not have the inputs required to increase her productivity, and her farming skills were basic at best, learned through season after season of trial and error. Farming was frustrating because it barely gave her enough money to feed her three children, take them to school, and pay hospital bills. But without capital and the requisite skills to expand her income sources, it was the only thing she could do.

Alice’s story is not uncommon. Smallholder farmers across Africa still face obstacles accessing suitable, affordable financial services. This is especially acute for women.

Around the world today, financial service providers, technology entrepreneurs and policy makers are engaged in building a financial system that reaches out to previously excluded people, such as lower income people, very small businesses, rural dwellers, and women. Although this work is carried out in the name of the consumer, all too often, scant attention is paid to the real needs and desires consumers and very small enterprise owners have.

With that in mind, here is a thought experiment. A thought experiment is an “exercise of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” The question for this experiment is this:

Imagine that consumers were the creators of the inclusive finance system. What would such a system look like?

The State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS), launched in May 2015, set an ambitious goal of expanding access to financial services from 10 percent of adults to at least 50 percent by the year 2020. Intermedia’s newly-released Financial Inclusion Insights (FII) data suggests that, as of 2016, Pakistan’s progress was not yet on a trajectory to get to 50 percent. It also suggests ways Pakistan could improve the rate of progress.

FII’s new 2016 Pakistan Annual Report and Survey Data finds that financial access rose only incrementally, from 15 percent to 16 percent, in 2016. More than 45 million more adults would need to take up a formal financial account for the country to achieve 50 percent financial inclusion as defined by the NFIS. Further, even if access is improved, registration and regular use of accounts may lag and prove a steeper climb. The percentage of adults holding registered accounts with a full-service financial institution did not increase at all over the last year, measuring 9 percent in 2015 and 2016. Similarly, active registered users over the same period remained unchanged at 8 percent.

However, these figures could be improved if the gap between the formal products on the market and Pakistanis’ actual, day-to-day financial needs and preferences is addressed, FII data indicates.

At the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), we spend a lot of time thinking of ways economically marginalized people can gain access to the capital they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Through our work, we’ve repeatedly seen that, while talent is universal, opportunity is not. Large swathes of the population across the developing world have limited access to the formal financial system and are stuck managing money in ways that are often inconvenient, inefficient, and sometimes even involve humiliation and abuse.

Focusing on places where economically vulnerable people are at risk, however instructive, risks obscuring the fact that great divides exist across gender in many diverse geographies. In developed countries as in the developing nations, women lag behind men in indicators that measure entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. Their societies are poorer for it. In the U.K., women-led businesses are far less likely to secure financing; 91 percent of investment was directed to companies without even one female founder. In the U.S., women make up half the labor force but own just a third of all companies.

Founding Sponsor

Credit Suisse is a founding sponsor of the Center for Financial Inclusion. The Credit Suisse Group Foundation looks to its philanthropic partners to foster research, innovation and constructive dialogue in order to spread best practices and develop new solutions for financial inclusion.

Note

The views and opinions expressed on this blog, except where otherwise noted, are those of the authors and guest bloggers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Financial Inclusion or its affiliates.